{"id":38235,"date":"2018-09-25T05:52:16","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T10:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38235"},"modified":"2018-09-25T05:52:16","modified_gmt":"2018-09-25T10:52:16","slug":"why-the-american-empire-has-lost-control-and-its-failure-is-imminent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38235","title":{"rendered":"Why the American empire has lost control\u2014and its failure is imminent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why the American empire has lost control\u2014and its failure is imminent<\/a><\/h3>\n

Pretending the world isn\u2019t bleak feeds the mania for unreal hope that exists within American culture, argues Chris Hedges<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Adrian Lee) <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chris Hedges\u2014Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, ordained Presbyterian minister, ferocious anti-corporate activist and prolific author\u2014has long occupied an isolated spot among American public intellectuals, as much a moral crusader as a political critic. But as American, and Western, politics continue to decay and xenophobic nativism continues to rise, Hedges, 61, seems less and less an outlier, his critique of contemporary America more acceptable to his countrymen. And that\u2019s without walking back any of his analysis. If Hedges was worried nine years ago in Empire of Illusion<\/em> that his nation\u2014like all republics before it\u2014would fail to survive the acquisition of an empire, he\u2019s now convinced it won\u2019t. The title of his newest book, America: The Farewell Tour<\/em>, says it all. In powerfully reported chapters\u2014including \u201cDecay\u201d (deindustrialization), \u201cHeroin\u201d (the opioid epidemic), \u201cSadism\u201d (the pornography-industrial complex), and \u201cHate\u201d (racism)\u2014Hedges talks to the most oppressed and dispossessed citizens of an empire he thinks has not much more than a decade of life left.<\/p>\n

Q: A very bleak and wide-ranging report. The Farewell Tour<\/em> is, in its way, the antithesis of Steven Pinker\u2019s Enlightenment Now<\/em>.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A:<\/strong> That book is the modern version of Candide<\/em>. I mean it is completely unplugged from reality. Pinker, who has spent his life in academic gardens like Harvard, just doesn\u2019t understand what societies look like when they break down. I\u2019ve been there. I\u2019m not an academic. I was primarily a war correspondent for 28 years. Pinker doesn\u2019t get the dark side of human nature and how technology has, in degenerated societies, accelerated the power to commit wholesale slaughter. People love his book. It\u2019s what they want to hear. But it\u2019s not real.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why the American empire has lost control\u2014and its failure is imminent Pretending the world isn\u2019t bleak feeds the mania for unreal hope that exists within American culture, argues Chris Hedges The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Adrian Lee) Chris Hedges\u2014Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, ordained Presbyterian minister, ferocious anti-corporate activist and prolific author\u2014has long occupied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[3602,21868,8775,21869,827],"class_list":["post-38235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-american-empire","tag-brian-bethune","tag-chris-hedge","tag-macleans","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38236,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38235\/revisions\/38236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}